Tom Stone's thoughts, ramblings, etc.

Today, as I watch Barack Obama place his left hand – that I shook eight months ago – on the bible of Abraham Lincoln to take the oath of office as the 44th president of the United States of America, I’ll be thinking back to a childhood friend in Louisville and 10 words that have haunted me in the 33 years since he spoke them to me: "God must not love me because he made me black," he said sobbing as he fell to the ground as though deflated by lack of hope. We'd been arguing as all boys do at times. Pushing each other, calling each other names. At some point, he made me really mad and I tried to hurt him -- with words ... one word ... one I'd heard way too many times and always filled with hate. I called him the "N" word. He burst into a rage and we both swung our fists like crazy at each other. He was mad as hell and I was surprised -- surprised I'd hurt my friend so badly. I didn’t know this word could hurt him this badly. After I fell to the gr...

OK, so now I've got a blog with my name on it. Why? I didn't want to be the LAST person in the world to have one. And it seems like more than half the world already has at least one. ;-) You'd think I would have signed up a bit sooner for a blog because I love to write and pretend someone's reading it.  My first career was working as a newspaper reporter and editor. So I got used to thinking people were reading what I wrote.  But while I was in college ('83-'87), I did a survey of college students back then to find out where they get their news and how many minutes/hours per day they spent with each type of media, and which one they trusted. NEWSPAPERS? They spent very little time reading them and didn't trust them as much as what they saw in 30-second "stories" on TV news. What the heck?  Thank goodness the Internet hadn't blossomed yet to totally erode all newspaper readers of that age yet as it mostly has now. What else have done? COLLEGE BO...